Research from the University of Bath highlights the largely unacknowledged pressures that remote working places on employees in the Global South, showing how economic, physical and emotional burdens are shifted onto Indian IT professionals supporting multinational companies. Drawing on interviews with fifty-one workers across India’s extensive technology sector, the study finds that the practical realities of working from home extend far beyond arranging a desk or managing work-life balance. Instead, employees must reorganise daily life within multigenerational households, wrestle with unreliable electricity and internet access, share limited bandwidth with family members and endure pervasive forms of digital surveillance imposed by employers.
The study reveals that while global firms benefit from reduced overheads, they frequently transfer responsibility for essential infrastructure to employees without adequate compensation or institutional support. Several participants described purchasing industrial-grade power backups to maintain consistent connectivity and investing significant portions of their salaries in equipment more commonly used in commercial operations. Others reported navigating bureaucratic barriers with housing associations to install necessary systems, and juggling complex domestic routines to remain online and available to international clients.
Professor Vivek Soundararajan, who led the research, explains that in many parts of the Global South, households are shared among extended families and embedded within unpredictable infrastructure. Under such conditions, the task of sustaining uninterrupted remote work falls not only on individual employees but also on entire households that must reorganise their living arrangements to accommodate professional obligations. Rather than eliminating workplace inequality, remote working can shift disparities into the home, amplifying tensions in environments that were never intended to function as full-time digital workplaces.
Published in the Journal of Economic Geography, the study identifies five major areas where Indian IT workers must continually adapt: the physical layout of domestic space, the structuring of time, access to technical resources, the negotiation of surveillance and the emotional strain of managing constant disruption. These adaptations illustrate how remote working transforms households into intricate ecosystems where professional and personal demands collide.
Given that India’s IT industry employs over 5.8 million professionals, the implications are significant. Co-author Dr Pankhuri Agarwal argues that organisations and policymakers must rethink remote working by acknowledging the central role of the home in enabling productive labour. Housing conditions, family structures and infrastructural volatility in the Global South differ markedly from those in the Global North, requiring more nuanced and equitable approaches. The researchers also note that infrastructural instability is becoming increasingly relevant worldwide as climate change and economic pressures strain systems even in developed countries, including the UK.
More information: Vivek Soundararajan et al, Remote work and reorganization of household infrastructure in the Global South: insights from the Indian information technology industry, Journal of Economic Geography. DOI: 10.1093/jeg/lbaf052
Journal information: Journal of Economic Geography Provided by University of Bath